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Comment by barney54 | Hacker News Reader

6. Wholesale electricity rates have increased from 50 Euros/mwh to 250 Euros/mwh over the course of the last year.

This isn't about averages. It's about meeting demand, which is especially important during the winter heating season.

7. Energy per capita has dropped by something like 20% from its peak in the 90s.

Germany is a great example that these renewable policies can't sustain an industrial lifestyle. Germany is something of a cautionary tale; adopting Germany's policies will make people worse off.

https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/germany

Arguing that energy sustainability changes have made people worse off because they've reduced per-capita energy use is blatantly begging the question. Maybe energy is being used 3x as efficiently as it was in the 90s and so people are 2.4x better off.

They'd still have a better lifestyle if they used the same amount of energy and used it more efficiently. The lifestyle Germans enjoy is falling behind a hypothetical world where they implemented a cheap energy policy.

How much energy they produce is much more important when assessing how their renewable transition is going. They have barely managed to tread water by doing less per capita and matching their old supply. This is a far cry from the optimistic touting that solar/wind was a viable market competitor to fossil fuels - the evidence here is that these forms of energy are worse.

> They'd still have a better lifestyle if they used the same amount of energy and used it more efficiently.

Only if you're assuming some kind of linear relationship between energy consumption and happiness, which seems extremely dubious.

Maybe not happiness but definitely living standards. In the US air conditioning systems are common in Germany not so much.

Right but you can't jump from that to assuming that US homes are nicer to live in - the difference is at least partly because more solid construction, traditional styles, and environmentalist design mean that German homes passively hold a comfortable temperature better than US ones. Air conditioning is a very brute-force solution to the problem and it comes with a significant downsides (noise, dry air that you then have to add more appliances to address, ugly, have to keep your windows closed...).

Lots of housing in Germany is well-insulated enough that AC is not needed. This argument seems dubious.

Electric heating is extremely uncommon in Germany (like 1-2 % of households use it).

If gas is used for both heating and electricity production, or share any other fuel source, the prices of electricity and heating will still be related.

Paying 41c/kWh for ökostrom / 100% renewable energy here, and doing some mining with two 150W Radeon 6000 GPUs to keep this computer room warm goes a long way to making it cost effective.

Using heat pumps also makes it almost on par with the cost of natural gas.

Heat pumps don't work below -10C, so this really depends on the local climate. You can use geothermal heat pumps, but now you're no longer near par.

Depends. The ones sold in Poland (and I guess Germany as the climate is similar) are often rated to work from -25C up.

Heat pumps are also loud.

Just as fossil fuel boilers are.

That's why you install them in the basement. If you can.

They really aren't. The outdoor units are comparable to air conditioners (60 db). I can't hear mine through the walls.

Exactly. All electric heating should be replaced by GPUs. If you need to heat up a room with electricity, at least do some proof of work along the way.

GPUs are just resistive heating with extra steps, COP 1. Heat pumps can do way better most of the time.

Hardware for mining cryptocurrency is self-financing in a relatively short period of time when the electricity is "free" since you're using it for heat anyway.

Heat pumps require a significant capital investment which would have to be recovered on only their efficiency improvement, since they don't otherwise generate revenue.

The math is different for new construction. There heat pumps make a lot more sense because the capital cost is relative to some other heating system you don't already have. Then the higher efficiency will generally cover the relative capital cost even if it wouldn't cover the total capital cost. This might still be less profitable than mining cryptocurrency (depending on a variety of factors) but better than any other traditional heating system.

> Hardware for mining cryptocurrency is self-financing in a relatively short period of time when the electricity is "free"

No it isn't. I know because I looked into it.

Assuming the price of bitcoin doesn't rise or fall, a cutting edge bit of dedicated bitcoin mining hardware will pay for itself in 3 years if operated continuously on free electricity, and will be effectively obsolete in 5 years, as difficulty increases and rewards drop.

So if you only operate the hardware 50% of the time it'll be obsolete before it's paid for itself.

That's because you're using Bitcoin, for which custom ASICs are a thousand times more power efficient than commodity hardware and so commodity hardware is useless, but custom ASICs are stupid expensive.

What you want is a cryptocurrency that ASICs are no better at than CPUs or GPUs, so can use an ordinary CPU or GPU that will pay for itself more quickly because most of the mining cost is electricity instead of hardware. (Hint: the hardware you want in this case has the best performance/$, not necessarily the best performance/watt.)

Which cryptocurrency would work for example? Monero?

The returns from CPU mining are really low. The advantage is you can use your existing PC(s) and not buy anything.

Tom's Hardware did a list for GPUs:

https://www.tomshardware.com/best-picks/best-mining-gpus-ben...

"Which cryptocurrency" will also vary over time since the prices are all over the place, but that's the other advantage of not-ASICs. You can switch to whichever one pays better this month.

"Heat pumps can do way better most of the time."

Sure, but they are so rare at present thay in my entire life I have not even seen one.

Your 100% renewable energy mentioning sounds like you believe this and use it as an excuse to make it okay.

Ignore my comment though if you would normally heat by electricity but you use an umlaut so i assume you are a german as well.

Just a few days/weeks ago we had an extreme price hike due to high demand. High demand should only come from consuming energy in a usefull way. Mining your shitcoins for nothing is not helping at all.

You still consume energy which wouldn't need to be consumed as we do have other and much more energy friendlih systems for transaction security.

You are basically an american who drives the biggest pickup truck available and using oekofuel and state its now okay to do this.

Don't forget heat pumps. EV sales have also increased recently.

7. Germany does not import a lot of energy ... but when it does it does so mostly from France [1]. I suggest that is because the french nuclear reactors provide an abundant amount of energy.

[1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2021/06...

That's a very good argument for the need to build much more renewable capacity in Germany, since that would substitute the burning of natural gas that caused this price increase.

Sure, we'll see it when it happens. Renewables are like a trickle at best, all the low hanging fruit there is taken, and the required battery capacity is huge....

There is no battery capacity required for the simple effect of substituting gas power plant operation. Any MWh generated by another source will simply remove the need to generate that MWh from gas, where the price of gas is the dominating component.

Not really. This is overly simplistic since it's not accounting for reliability/predictability of supply. Natural gas can be turned into MWh on demand, at night, when there's no wind, during consumption anomalies, etc. It's clearly not interchangeable with renewables MWh for MWh like you're suggesting.

You also have to pay the gas. Gas backups for power are just stupid without any own supply. In winter, we also need the gas for heating, that will not change in the next 30-40 years.

> Renewables are like a trickle at best

Doesn't Germany have a lot of wind power? Denmark sure does.

Let's see, 27.2% wind in 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany

And apparently there's a fair bit of North Sea area that can be used for new offshore wind.

Percentages are misleading when it comes to power sources that only work some of the time.

It would be really fascinating to see hourly/monthly percentages as a stacked bar chart.

That wasn't theoretical installed base, it was actual power produced.

Do you only use electricity only some hours a day?

No it’s usage need to be constant, or you'll get black-outs in regions where the grids 50hz frequency cannot be kept - which a lot of communals in Sweden are dangerously close to.

And if you don't keep the network balanced, you'll get complete blackouts instead of regional blackouts.

Well, speaking for myself, I do use different amounts of electricity during the day. As does everyone in my region. And your region, probably.

But you want to be able to use electricity when you need it, right?

> That wasn't theoretical installed base, it was actual power produced

That's not what I'm saying. On a windy day, then doubling your number of wind turbines will (roughly) double your power output. But if there's no wind, your output drops to zero. Contrast that with nuclear power, where doubling capacity doubles output always.

So with nuclear power you could say that based on what current output we have, if we build X more capacity we could retire all polluting energy sources.

With wind (say) you can't say that.

So, you're saying that if we adopt a stupid wind policy, bad things will happen?

I'd agree with that. Have you considered adopting a good policy instead?

If you read my comments you'll see what I said, which is that such percentages are misleading. Not sure what's causing your newfound silliness.

But this is an issue of Russia putting the squeeze on gas prices, not an inherent issue of the German energy system.

Being dependent on imported gas seems like an inherent issue of the German energy system.

Heating is largely natural gas based, so it's not substitutive. I don't think Germany should be shutting down its nuclear reactors, but that has nothing to do with Russian gas. (Unless perhaps they started making synthetic methane using the heat of a nuclear reactor, which is not a terrible idea but not something they are currently doing AFAIK.)

To be fair, residential/commercial heating could be entirely electric, and heat pumps have additional benefits over natural gas heating (like being reversible in the summer).

Presumably people would switch if the cost of electricity was low enough for it to be more economical. Decisions that result in the price of electricity staying high provide political leverage to gas producers.

Though, eyeballing the numbers, it really should be very attractive to install heat pumps in the EU despite the high electricity cost. The cost of natural gas is quite high.

This would be very difficult for the grid. Switching to electric heating is a big hurdle.

Electric heating? Do you mean resistive heating, or heat pumps? It's been difficult in this discussion to figure out what people are saying.

And when you say resistive, do you mean element within (an electric) boiler, radiators to work as normal, or something more direct, electric radiators/underfloor/etc.?

I think it doesn't really matter much what is meant throughout - point was about shifting gas demand on to the electricity supply, and whether the grid could cope with it if everyone did that to a meaningful degree.

Resistive heating means using 1kw of electricity to get 1kw of heat.

Heat pumps use 1kw of electricity to get >1kw heat.

Not necessarily, it's just uncorrelated since it's not what's doing the actual heating.

Similarly a gas boiler uses 1kW electricity (for the pump) to get potentially >1kW heat out of radiators (and pipes). Because that heat is energy conserved from the gas, not the electricity.

Anyway I didn't mention heat pumps or compare them to resistive heating so I'm not sure what I'm defending.

In northern countries where the primary need is heating (and there is very little need for cooling), heat pumps at current electricity and gas prices are 2x more expensive per kWh of heat put into the property. They are also about 3x more expensive to install.

They only make sense in places that need cooling too, or when electricity gets cheaper.

Are those 2019 numbers or 2021 numbers?

Numbers from 1 hour ago... From the UK, and assuming UK climate for COP figures. ~True with both retail capped prices, and wholesale market prices.

There are still people in the UK installing heat pumps. Either they have a very rose tinted view of the future direction of electricity prices Vs gas, a rose tinted view of future government taxes/incentives, a rose tinted view of the environmental benefits (eg. By looking at aggregate CO2 emissions instead of marginal CO2 emissions), or they have been misled by installers/builders who make substantially more money if they install a heat pump.

Either that or I got my maths wrong. But I don't think I did.

Thank you! And I can venture a few more hypotheses (from least to most likely):

1. Altruism

2. Already committed

3. They have a pessimistic view of future gas prices.

4. They have solar.

5. They're in a long tail/corner case/different use case from the one you computed.

I'd put my money on 5, depending on how big a % difference. Eg. I've noticed more and more people switching to solar as prices come down and hit an inflection point for them in their use case. Wouldn't be surprised if heat pumps are the same.

I'm installing heat pumps in the US.

* I'm tired of tenants installing window air conditioners.

* I pay for steam heat myself whereas tenants will pay for electricity used by their heat pump.

from the UK - groundsource vs air-source heat pumps makes a huge difference. Last i checked:

- ground source was roughly parity with gas (with something like an 8x higher install cost)

- air source heat pumps were more expensive to operate but similar on install costs

However comparing on cost only misses the point, a heat pump is generally capable of cooling as well, which is becoming more of a necessity in the summer.

P.S. You can do silly things with ground loops like use excess solar power to cool during the summer or daytime storing that heat in the ground, then removing some of it in the winter/nighttime.

Can you expand on the aggregate CO2 vs marginal CO2 part ?

I’m looking into installing a ground heat pump in a new house (coupled with solar panels) mostly for environmental reasons and all the critics I’ve read so far were about the costs.

If you turn on a light and use some extra electricity, some power station somewhere will need to increase power output to provide for you.

It's the CO2 production of that extra generation, known as marginal generation, you should care about, not the nationwide average.

Most of the time, in most of the world, that extra generation is combined cycle gas turbines at ~50% efficiency.

For most people, the only time a new use of electricity is eco-friendly is when all the energy in a country is already supplied by wind/solar/hydro, and therefore a newly switched on thing also gets supplied by wind/solar/hydro.

Obviously the decision to installation a heat pump depends on the marginal generation in 15 years when you are still using that heat pump. That's very hard to predict.

"current electricity and gas prices"? Those vary.

> They only make sense in places that need cooling too, or when electricity gets cheaper.

Heat pumps are used way farther north in the US since I was a kid, including (now) in places that don't need cooling.

In Sweden natural gas is hardly used yet electricity prices have gone up astronomically compared to last year - daily rates are now around 10 to 20 times what they were last year around the same time. Heating in Sweden is a combination of electric (resistive elements and heat pumps), wood in some form (firewood, pellets, wood chips), some oil and process heat from industry where available. The Swedish equivalent of the German Greens is proudly proclaiming they're the ones who have closed nuclear power plants long before their calculated lifetime was out, leading to an increased need for electricity imports from e.g. Poland (mostly coal-fired plants). Their "green" policy has led to oil-fired power plants which normally only come online in the deep of winter to be fired up in summer to prevent brown-outs.

It's amazing. How many so-called zero emissions cars will be running on lignite next year?

Oh, I give up.

Not that many. Power from Poland or Germany is not that common in Sweden, Sweden exports most of the time. It can happen during periods of low winds, but it's not that frequent.

It has become far more frequent than it used to after the closure of Ringhals 1 and Barsebäck, two nuclear power plants in the south of Sweden. The power grid in Sweden is designed to take electricity produced mostly by hydroelectric plants in the north and middle and nuclear in the south. The closure of those nuclear plants in the south has led to an imbalance, especially given the increase in power use in the south. To make matters worse the "government" - between quotes here because they hardly deserve that term - allowed the establishment of several data centres by the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Google, each of which consumes enough electricity to make it impossible for other industry to be established in the same area given the limits of the distribution network. To make things even worse those data centres got a really sweet deal on electricity, they're not paying all the taxes and surcharges which other consumers and industry have to. In return they provide a couple of dozen jobs, each of which was subsidised by the Swedish state (in addition to the mentioned deal on electricity) to the tune of 2.5 million SEK (around $275.000,-).

Here's some more choice words on the failures of the current Swedish energy policy:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2021/02/28/irrationa...

Don't. Keep on pointing out this lie, not so much to smear electric vehicles - given good battery technology these are a good idea - but to make clear that the powertrain is as clean as its dirtiest link. Whether this is a browncoal-fired powerplant, a polluting Cobalt mine employing child labour or fields full of not recyclable wind turbine blades, these things need to be taken out of the chain for the technology to deserve the "green" label. Given that an increase in CO₂ will lead to an increase in biomass [1,2] you may as well apply a "green" label to fossile fuels, it would be just as disingenuous.

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2015.0004...

[2] https://gml.noaa.gov/icdc7/proceedings/abstracts/bhattHI49.p...

"daily rates are now around 10 to 20 times what they were last year around the same time"

Really? 10 to 20x? That's 1,000 to 2,000% Here in the UK we've had suppliers collapse due to some "issues" involving not buying with fixed prices and end users like you and me get bills that are about 150% last year but not 1,000%.

We have (had) quite a lot of innovative suppliers that offered "green" tariffs that were backed by variable suppliers. Unfortunately the shit hit the fan and the price charged back in the day wasn't enough to cover the current rate plus enough profit to cover admin.

Yes, really. The price of electricity is set through a controlled market mechanism at "Nord Pool", the electricity producers exchange for the Nordic countries. Nearly all producers and sellers have pages showing these prices, here's an example:

https://www.vattenfall.se/elavtal/elpriser/timpris-pa-elbors...

and another:

https://elen.nu/dagens-spotpris/se3-stockholm/

Timpris på elbörsen (on the first site, "vattenfall") means "hourly rate on the electricity exchange". Have a look at the rates for area 3 - Södra Mellansverige (south of the middle of Sweden) and compare with the same day last year ("jämför med - Samma dag föregående år"). You'll see that the rates average some 500 öre (5 sek, about $0.55) per kWh excluding taxes, levies, surcharges and value added tax. At the same day last year the rate averaged about 20 öre, i.e. a difference of 2500%. The rates fluctuate hourly and the last few weeks they've broken all records. The increase for the last month was +245%, averaged over the whole year rates have doubled.

[edit]

Nord Pool have their own reporting on prices:

https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/Market-data1/#/nordic/table

I'm still trying to work out the numbers.

I'm quite surprised that Scandinavia is having even more problems than say the UK because you have rather a lot of useful topological features (really big hills and mountains and lakes at elevation - ie potential energy). You are also closer to the Ukraine than us for gas so that should be cheaper too.

Our consumer energy market is a bit strange. We have a national grid for eleccy and then have multiple "suppliers" who supposedly compete. The ones who went balls out have gone bust. They generally offered fixed and flexible rates based on the wholesale cost plus their margin. Then the wholesale cost went up rather a lot and they lost their margin and without money in the bank, they went bust. The govt agency for energy then enforced other suppliers to take us on. So I was a customer of "Green" and now I'm a customer of "Shell Energy". You can be sure that Shell are not losing out in any way 8)

I've just noticed that you use the term Nordic countries - is that a better/preferred term to use than Scandinavia?

The Nordic countries include Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland and Finland

Scandanavia includes Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. The common factor there is having closely related languages and cultures. However, speaking from experience as an American, we often use "Scandanavian" as a synonym of "Nordic".

Nord Pool covers all the Nordic countries plus a lot more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Pool

We're not surprised by these problems because we saw them coming, it's just really disheartening to see the expected negative downfall of the policies enacted by the "green" party and its followers. Add to this the fact that this party hardly has any support - they are currently underneath the 4% limit and will most likely disappear from Riksdagen (the Swedish parliament) and it becomes even more incongruous that they have been allowed to have such an extraordinary negative effect on the future energy supply in this country. To add insult to injury they recently stepped out of the coalition (between the "green" "miljöpartiet" (which means "environmental party")) and the social democrats, less than a year before the coming elections. They're now in supposed opposition, acting as if the negative effects are all someone else's fault. May they never reach the threshold again so that those who care for the environment stop believing this party is the one to vote for.

10-12 years ago the UK govt signed deals with some companies that would be building the new nuclear power plants ie EDF that they would be getting a minimum price for generation which was double what it was back then. I often think we dont have a free market but a clever fixed pricing market. UK is also windiest country in the world hence all our wind turbines. Dont know if more Electric Mountains will be built to buffer the surplus wind power as more turbines come online, but the bigger the turbine the more that is generated which is the natural progression we are seeing.

Little know fact kept out of the media when we had all the flooding over winter a few years back, one nuclear power station had to be shutdown to avoid a meltdown caused by flooding.

Electricity consumption has gone up with the increase in consumer gadgets, ie computers, tablets, mobiles, big massive flat screens, sound systems ie personal cinema setups, its only natural to see electricity demands go up.

And there is not enough of some of the rare earth materials and other metals used to make or maintain electric cars on the planet unless some miners have been keeping deposits secret, so I expect some miners share prices to go up considerably in the future.

If that were true here in the USA my bill would go from $200 in the winter to $2000. I could afford that but poor people would just have to turn off the heat and suffer and some of them die, so this seems..... like there's more to the story.

It has to do with gas, because 12% of electricity in Germany is produced by burning natural gas. That's up by 4pp from 2018. That's according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany

Electricity absolutely, unarguably, is a substitute for gas.

Not when your building's central heating is done by a natural gas furnace. Not without expensive retrofitting.

(Which should be done. But it'll take time.)

It should be done, but that's almost impossible. Retro fitting to a heat pump is very expensive, you have to replace all radiators with underfloor heating and the insulation has to be redone. While this is done, you can't live in your home.

How can you say this so confidently when it's not true.

There are electric boilers...

Radiators are heated by boilers...

No heat pump necessary...

You act like everyone can just miraculously pay for an entirely new HVAC system on the spur of a moment?

HVAC in Europe is, relative to America, non-existent

Edit: hyperbole ^

Gas is used for both heating and electricity. If less gas is needed for electricity heating costs will go down.

Or using reactor waste heat to heat houses.

Well having 70% Fossil Fuel share means you can be easily manipulated by petrostates she in fact You don’t want that

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